On his Dangerous Idea blog Victor Reppert refers to a 2007 article by Washington Post writer Michael Gerson: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/12/AR2007071201620.html I did not see this article at the time, and my reason for commenting on it now is that the arguments it gives are ones we have heard many times and ones that will be heard again ad nauseam. Though hackneyed in the extreme, these arguments need to be addressed again and again, and their … [Read more...]

Standard accounts of secularization emphasize how social changes that led to the modern world undermine organized religion. Few people actively wanted religion to become a more private affair – secularization has always proceeded against a background of shirt-rending about the erosion of public morality. And few were affected by intellectual critiques of religion. Science, for example, had little to do with the European decline of organized religion except in an indirect sense, where s … [Read more...]

Religionlink.com has just put up "Freethinkers: A source guide to atheists, humanists and other nontheists." It's intended as a resource guide for journalists interested in various forms of nonbelief, but it's useful for other purposes as well. It's worth a quick look. … [Read more...]

The discussion following my earlier post on "the hard problem" has gone on at rather great length, and has broached a number of topics. One of those topics has been theistic explanation, and Alex Dalton and Dianelos Georgoudis have raised some points that need further argument and clarification. First, when, if ever, would a rational atheist such as (ahem) myself be driven, "as a last resort" to admit that something is inexplicable on naturalistic terms and concede that it must be due to the … [Read more...]

Ibn Warraq, the well-known critic of Islam and author and editor of books such as Why I Am Not A Muslim, has left the Center for Inquiry to join the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a neoconservative Washington DC think tank. [Thanks to David Harding for pointing this out to me.]There is an interesting tendency for the most vociferous critics of Islam to get wrapped up in neoconservative politics. Perhaps (and I can only speculate here) this has to do with the tendency for both popular … [Read more...]

Growing Number of Americans Say Obama is a Muslim"A new national survey by the Pew Research Center finds that nearly one-in-five Americans (18%) now say Obama is a Muslim, up from 11% in March 2009. Only about one-third of adults (34%) say Obama is a Christian, down sharply from 48% in 2009. Fully 43% say they do not know what Obama’s religion is."http://pewforum.org/Politics-and-Elections/Growing-Number-of-Americans-Say-Obama-is-a-Muslim.aspxU.S. Religious Knowledge Survey"On average, Americans … [Read more...]